In an official statement on Thursday, the cinema company announced that IMAX together with its other partner companies has formed a $50 million investment fund to achieve its goal of extending virtual reality media projects on films and video games.
The companies that will support IMAX on this endeavor include the electronics hardware maker Acer, entertainment and sports firm Creative Artists Agency, media investment fund China Media Capital, British advertising firm WPP, and China entertainment company Enlight Media.
Amidst a comparative lack of must-see or must-play Virtual Reality media that is currently available in to the market, the aim of this move is to finance the formulation of compelling virtual reality content. IMAX did not announce what ventures it intends to invest in. However, said that it would search for video game producers and projects "with its Hollywood studio and filmmaker partners."
According to IMAX, the $50 million fun is associated to the big-screen company's soon to open virtual reality entertainment hubs IMAX thinks of creating to movie theaters and shopping malls in the United States, the United Kingdom, China, the Middle East and in other parts of the world to be able to reach its target market and make virtual reality readily accessible to all.
In a statement, IMAX Chief Business Development Officer Robert D. Lister said, "With VR in its ascendancy, this initiative is a key step in ensuring that more high-quality content makes its way to various VR platforms, including IMAX VR centers."
IMAX (an acronym for Image maximum) is a Canadian motion picture film format and a set of cinema projection standards developed by Graeme Ferguson, Roman Kroitor, Robert Kerr, and William C. Shaw. IMAX has the capacity to record and display images of far greater size and resolution than conventional film systems. Since 2002, some feature films have been converted (or upgraded) into IMAX format for displaying in IMAX theatres and some have also been partially shot in IMAX.
IMAX is the most widely used system for special-venue film presentations. As of June 2016, there were 1,102 IMAX theatres in 69 countries.
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